TV star Jill Halfpenny Spotting another actress at AA helped me go teetotal

FORMER EastEnders star and Strictly winner Jill Halfpenny says seeing a fellow actress at her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting helped her to go teetotal.

- Mark Jefferies

Jill, 48, describes in her new book how she used to binge drink to forget about her father's death, which was not really discussed when she was growing up with her mum and sisters.

She says it helped her "escape" and "stop thinking".

Jill, who also starred in The Long Shadow, Coronation Street, Three Girls, The Drowning and The Holiday, has been teetotal for over a decade.

But she says her drinking had reached a point where she was getting more drunk than the people she was with and crashed out on sofas.

Escape

In A Life Reimagined: My Journey of Hope in the Midst of Loss, she writes: "I began to see that I became a different person when I drank and I didn't always like who I became.

"I needed to be honest with myself and the people in my life. For a long time, alcohol had helped me escape, to stop thinking, to change the way I felt about myself.

"Conversely, I thought it also helped me access all the things that lay dormant inside me."